National Poetry Month 2020!

     Hello, and happy National Poetry Month! It's one of my favorite times of the year, when readers and writers celebrate they myriad forms of poetry. I didn't realize the other day that I released my poetry volume just in time for National Poetry Month...go me!
     Poetry does so many things: inspires, incites rebellion, soothes, sears, send the soul soaring, sympathizes with our sorrows, reveals, releases, questions, queries, comments, and condemns. The earliest forms of literature are poetry fragments form Egypt, Sumeria, and China. What would we be without poetry? Would we be human? Or is poetry not only the province of humankind? Whales sing; are they not poets? What is poetry, what does it mean? Not individual poems, but the art of poetry itself. What moves poets to create in this manner? As a poet myself, I should be able to answer, but I can't. Some things cannot be said in a story, they need to be written as fragments, pieces of a puzzle I don't understand but need to solve. To write poetry is to touch one's own soul, to dare to show the world pieces of you that you try to keep hidden from yourself.
     Poetry isn't only words, it is color, emotion, vision, a reaching into the universe to find out who we are. Poetry is, just as we are.

Poetry

Marianne Moore - 1887-1972

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
      all this fiddle.
   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
      discovers that there is in
   it after all, a place for the genuine.
      Hands that can grasp, eyes
      that can dilate, hair that can rise
         if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
      they are
   useful; when they become so derivative as to become
      unintelligible, the
   same thing may be said for all of us—that we
      do not admire what
      we cannot understand. The bat,
         holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
      wolf under
   a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse
      that feels a flea, the base-
   ball fan, the statistician—case after case
      could be cited did
      one wish it; nor is it valid
         to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must
      make a distinction
   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets,
      the result is not poetry,
   nor till the autocrats among us can be
     “literalists of
      the imagination”—above
         insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them,
      shall we have
   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—
   the raw material of poetry in
      all its rawness, and
      that which is on the other hand,
         genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

https://poets.org/poem/poetry

The Poet

 
    She is working now, in a room
    not unlike this one,
    the one where I write, or you read.
    Her table is covered with paper.
    The light of the lamp would be
    tempered by a shade, where the bulb's
    single harshness might dissolve,
    but it is not, she has taken it off.
    Her poems? I will never know them,
    though they are the ones I most need.
    Even the alphabet she writes in
    I cannot decipher. Her chair --
    Let us imagine whether it is leather
    or canvas, vinyl or wicker. Let her
    have a chair, her shadeless lamp,
    the table. Let one or two she loves
    be in the next room. Let the door
    be closed, the sleeping ones healthy.
    Let her have time, and silence,
    enough paper to make mistakes and go on.

                          Jane Hirshfield

http://wenaus.org/poetry/the-poet.html

Poetry - Poem by Pablo Neruda 

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.


https://www.poemhunter.com/poems/poetry/page-1/32383/